3.15. Discussion topics.

Clothes, hair, music, entertainment and lifestyle in the 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s. There is some important vocabulary here. In the 1960s people still wore their hair in quiffs, until the Beatles came along and changed the world. They used to have ‘basin’ haircuts and ‘sharp’ suits. Other celebrities started wearing their hair long, like the Rolling Stones used to, or mini skirts and ‘bob’ haircuts like the model Twiggy. Then suddenly it was all marijuana and LSD, flowers, peace and love. Groovy! At rock concerts from the end of that decade people often used to wear... no clothes at all.

The seventies were sometimes referred to as ‘the decade that style forgot’. People used to wear platform shoes, flared or bell bottomed trousers. Look at your parent’s photos. They used to wear their hair long and have those enormous collars! Then came the punk revolution and everybody dyed their hair different colours and used to wear anything shocking. Ask your father if he used to have blue hair.

If the 1970s were bad, the 1980s were surely worse. At least people in the seventies used to have a sense of irony or kitch. In the 1980s those curly highlighted hairstyles were so tacky. People used to watch Miami Vice on the TV, and that Beverly Hills show. There used to be all those ‘yuppies’ everywhere, and everyone was obsessed with making money. Do you remember?

We all used to listen to a lot of dance music in the nineties. First acid house, then techno, then jungle. A lot of people were taking ecstasy tablets. At least we used to have better haircuts than the generations before. That was also the time when we started getting used to all the new technology like mobile telephones and the Internet. Now in the new millennium I’m getting used to being a bald middle-aged man with a wife and eight children. I haven’t enough hair to grow it long, and I’m too fat for my leather trousers. With all the children I don’t have time to follow fashion anymore. Shame really.